SEO: You Can’t Make Chicken Salad from Chicken s#*!

You can’t make chicken salad with chicken s#*!, or so the saying goes. The same is true when it comes to your SEO. You cannot expect exemplary results if you don’t start with exemplary ingredients. In this case – your website.

Regardless of the age of your site, how much you paid for it, how beautiful it is, how proud you are of it and how many compliments it receives, if Google (Yahoo! & Bing) don’t like it, very few people are ever going to see it. Remember, beauty is only skin deep; it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Google (which gets over 65% of search traffic) typically makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 changes annually to its algorithm that determines the order in which website results are returned. I contend there are a couple of reasons; one being they are a business that needs to turn a profit and guaranteed top placement involves spending money on AdWords, and two is to give the visitor a more fulfilling experience by returning a more effective and engaging list of sites.

Let’s follow reason number two. We all know how frustrating it is to enter a query, click on the website and NOT find what we are looking for. Google knows that too. In order to combat that, they read [spider] as many sites as possible and utilizing their [top secret] algorithm, store them in a database for calling when the appropriate query is made… like “kitchen remodel”.

Smart folks are continually testing and tweaking websites to determine the secrets of the latest algorithm. As SEO companies learn, use and sometimes abuse the rules to gain advantage, Google tightens and change the rules… again. Often they are minor tweaks to keep people guessing, other times they are momentous – like the rule change in early 2011. What used to be considered quality SEO techniques are often useless or even harmful a year (or less) later. So how do you keep up?

Remember two things:

Google is trying to provide the best possible experience to the user.

Google’s spiders are learning about what you have to offer by reading your site.

Be sure your website easily indexed, authentic and updated often with quality content. A website with poor architecture, aging content, outdated code and other issues often associated with spiders’ inability to read a site cannot be “SEO’d” without first improving the site from the inside out.

The Kitchen & Bath Channel offers a low cost complete SEO Site Audit before we begin any project so we both know what kind of investment may be necessary to meet your expectations. It’s like remodeling a kitchen, if you have to move pipes, add circuits or make structural changes to the space both you and the homeowner should know that from the outset!